For Millennials, A Happier Day At Work Starts With The Morning Commute

Life in the modern world has trained young people to write off certain spans of time as wasted. The time we spend sitting in waiting rooms, for example, or the time it takes to drive to work each morning.

Sticking to the wasted-time narrative may do more harm than good. Your commute is a great opportunity to mentally prepare yourself for the day ahead and lay the foundation for a better, more productive and overall happier experience.

There are a number of things you can do to improve your overall mood throughout the day, and quite a few of them take place in the morning.

Start With Your Commute

This won’t come as a great shock to you, but most young people absolutely loathe their morning commutes. Americans of all ages might think they’re unique in that respect, but they’re hardly alone.

Armed with that knowledge, it makes sense that commuting can negatively affect our days and influence our moods. Nothing spoils good intentions in the workplace quite like arriving with a racing heart and a threadbare temper.

Learn to make the most of your commute. Try to find a podcast or an audiobook that can capture your attention without distracting you. Or maybe use a hands-free mindfulness app to put yourself in a more positive frame of mind. You could also call a friend or loved one to reconnect. Or think of three (or more) things you can be grateful for.

Whatever it is, use it to kick-start a more positive outlook that can last all day long — but remember to never drive while distracted.

Pexels.com

Don’t Neglect Your Health

Research has confirmed that healthier people are generally quite a bit happier than unhealthy people. When something is wrong with our bodies, we know it — and it can cause all kinds of stress and preoccupying worry. This fact doesn’t only apply to big issues, like injuries or illnesses. It can be smaller issues, like a general lack of physical activity or low blood sugar.

Health is a key component of happiness, so you should take yours seriously if you want to have the best day possible, every day. This isn’t a medical journal, and I’m not going to dispense heavy-duty medical advice. Each body is unique and has its own peculiar needs.

Here’s some general advice that’s worth keeping in mind:

Eat something. You’re going to hear plenty of advice about what kinds of food, and how much of it, you should eat in the morning. Ignore it! Your body is your own, and there’s no point trying to force somebody else’s habits upon yourself.

It can be argued that beginning your day with nourishment, such as a granola bar or a glass of juice, is a sensible idea — but don’t eat more than your body wants. Sometimes it takes our bodies as much time to wake up as it takes our minds, so a nibble on your way out the door and then a healthy snack at your desk might be fine for you.

Get physical. Here’s one piece of conventional wisdom that you shouldn’t ignore: Thirty minutes of physical activity each day is the bare minimum.

Regular activity’s positive impact on your body cannot be overstated, and it will perhaps improve your day in unimaginable ways. Regular cardio, for example, will literally change the way your body processes oxygen, improving your stamina and lowering your overall heart rate — a key component to becoming less stress-prone.

Remember to breathe. For something we do virtually every second of the day, we really get breathing wrong. If you’re not taking a few moments out of each day to engage in some deep breathing, you’re missing out. Deep breathing , and help us manage daily stresses better.

Deep breathing focuses on a few key components. Flare your nostrils to allow for maximum airflow. From there, concentrate on feeling your lungs fill — you should feel your belly, rather than your chest, inflate as you do so. Finally, let your deep breath out slowly through your mouth — in through your nose, out through your mouth.

Engaging in deep breathing once or twice during your workday can have a profound impact on y

our happiness and productivity.

End With Your Drive Home

We began this journey toward a happier and more fulfilling day with your morning commute, so let’s wrap things up with your drive home.

You can learn a lot about human beings by observing the way they drive as they commute back home. Tailgating, angry glances, sabotaged zipper merges — these are all symptoms that somebody has had a stressful day. And just like a house of cards, each commute seems to build on the next one. We build habits and precedents when we commit to driving angrily, aggressively or recklessly. Each commute will be worse than the last if we don’t build good habits.

Lesson one: Leave space. You’ll be amazed at how much less stressful your drive will be if you leave a few car lengths between your front bumper and the rear bumper of the car in front of you. You’ll use your brakes less, and merges of all kinds will be much less painful.

Lesson two: Show a little compassion. You’re thinking of what awaits you at home. Maybe it’s your significant other, your children or your dog. You want to be with them and unwind. Everybody else on the road is also trying to get home. If everybody drove a little more accommodatingly — compassionately — rush hour traffic wouldn’t be the horrible experience we’ve made it.

If there’s one takeaway, it’s that happiness requires a certain state of mind. This state of mind is something you can cultivate in actions as small as breathing deliberately, or letting somebody merge in front of you.

Before long, you might find that happiness is like a kind of snowball — all it needs is a small push.

I am a digital marketing specialist, freelance writer and the founder of Punched Clocks, a career advice blog that focuses on happiness and creating a career you love. I graduated from The Pennsylvania State University in 2014 with majors in Marketing and Economics and a foc...